05 February 2017 1:03 AM

In British public life, nothing succeeds like failure, provided you belong to the Blessed Company of the Politically Correct. We learn from media leaks that two politically correct women, Cressida Dick, pictured right and Sara Thornton, pictured below, in hat, are on the final shortlist for the post of Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Although we are supposed not to care any longer what sex anyone is, those in charge of this appointment no doubt long to choose the ‘first woman’ to hold the job. And if they do, they will be applauded wildly by the Left-wing establishment. I am more interested in whether these people are up to the job, regardless of sex, which is surely the truly anti-sexist position. Let’s see what happens. Whoever holds this post has a huge and lasting influence over policing throughout the country. He or she will have the ear of Ministers and immense media access. Other forces will strive to copy what they do. But if either Ms Dick or Ms Thornton were politically incorrect white-skinned males, I do not think they would be in the competition at all. No doubt both are perfectly pleasant people, well educated and charming. They are beloved by the BBC’s Woman’s Hour, have been decorated with medals and invited to Royal occasions. But both are personally linked to gigantic and undoubted police failures. Ms Dick was ‘Gold Commander’ in charge of the 2005 ‘operation’ in which the wholly innocent Jean Charles de Menezes was mistakenly shot dead on the London Underground after officers wrongly assumed he was a terrorist. After this she was repeatedly promoted to higher positions before being transferred to the Foreign Office for some lofty function.Ms Thornton was in charge of Thames Valley Police when they were inexcusably slow to act against a gang of men who subjected several young girls to appalling sexual abuse in Oxford. In March 2015, Maggie Blyth, of the Oxfordshire Safeguarding Children Board, who had compiled a report on the episode, said: ‘It is shocking that these children were subjected to such appalling sexual exploitation for so long.’ She spoke of ‘a culture across all organisations that failed to see that these children were being groomed in an organised way by groups of men’. Ms Thornton responded: ‘We are ashamed of the shortcomings identified in this report and we are determined to do all we can to ensure that nothing like this ever happens again.’No doubt. But, like Ms Dick’s problems, it did not affect her climb to the top. Asked if she had considered resigning, she said: ‘The focus has got to be moving forward. I think the focus for me is on driving improvements in the future.’ By then she was already on her way to take up a post as head of the new National Police Chiefs’ Council.I know little of Ms Thornton. I live in the area whose policing she used to head. Until this newspaper made a fuss, her organisation was reluctant to provide escorts for the hearses bearing dead soldiers home from Afghanistan, which passed through her area.But otherwise, it is no more absent and reactive than any other police ‘service’ I know of, which isn’t saying much. As for Ms Dick, she was on her way to the summit from the start. She was sent on a ‘national police high-flyers’ course’ in the 1980s. There she wrote a dissertation, arguing that ‘the way Lady Thatcher used the police to crush the miners had undermined public support, by creating the impression that the police had been reduced to the status of political tools’.

As a senior officer in Oxford, she preferred to withdraw rather than disperse demonstrators who had blocked a major road by holding an all-day rave. She said that there were children among the protesters and ‘although people were breaking the law and causing disruption we let it go ahead’. In 2002, as the Metropolitan Police ‘Diversity Director’, she launched a poster campaign in London urging the public to report to the police those whose views they found hateful.For many years I have tried to point out that the public don’t want or need this sort of policing, and long only for a force that is visible on the streets and deters the crime and disorder that now affect so many. Nobody listens, just as nobody listened to all the other points I and others patiently made for years about (for example) education, drugs, immigration and the EU. Those who ignore these warnings will, in the end, face an explosion of wrath which will make Donald Trump look like Woody Allen. And then, no doubt, they’ll all go out on petulant, sweary demonstrations complaining about the thing they have themselves helped to create. It’ll be too late.

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Bellowing at the wrong villain

Ministers and others continue to shout and squawk about Russia, a poor, weak country which is no threat to us, and which isn’t even especially interested in us. Is this because they lack the guts to tackle the giant, rich bully China, whose despots are entertained in Buckingham Palace?

I’ve seen no sign of any toughness over China’s blatant and lawless kidnap, from his Hong Kong home, of the billionaire Xiao Jianhua. Peking’s secret police appear to have waltzed across the border from the mainland and snatched him away. This is only the latest such incident, along with plenty of other crude and menacing interference in the former British colony.

China agreed in a solemn treaty in 1997 to respect Hong Kong as a separate territory until 2047. It seems to me they have decided we are now so weak they don’t need to bother.

Making militant and belligerent speeches about Russia is no substitute for real diplomatic courage.

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Hurrah for the broadcaster Jeremy Vine, like me a cyclist, for standing up to a bullying driver who treated him like a second-class citizen. She’s now been convicted and may face prison.

I think it’s thanks to another broadcasting Jeremy, this time Jeremy Clarkson, that so many drivers think cyclists ‘shouldn’t be on the road as they don’t pay road tax’. I’ve had this nonsense said to me by drivers who’ve treated me with similar dangerous bad manners.

Not all of them behave as badly as the woman who threatened Jeremy Vine. But they need to learn that cyclists pay just as much tax as they do, quite possibly more, and that they need space and consideration.

In my view, nobody should be allowed a driving licence until he has ridden a bike in city traffic and seen what his behaviour looks and feels like.

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Since Saving Private Ryan, war films have spared us very little of the gruesome truth about battle, which turns out to be disgusting and shameful and not glorious at all.

Now Mel Gibson’s new film Hacksaw Ridge confuses the matter even more, showing the exploits of a deeply Christian American, Desmond Doss (played by Andrew Garfield), who volunteered to serve as a medic – but not fight – in the Pacific.

It’s based on a true story. Doss, portrayed left in the movie, wouldn’t carry a rifle into combat, but rescued an astonishing number of his wounded comrades from under Japanese guns.

He even saved Japanese lives. But as far as I could see, he would have saved more lives if he’d been willing to carry and use a firearm. And in any case his efforts were tiny compared to the vast butchery all around him.

It just made me wonder more than I ever had before, exactly why there was a war against Japan (which, until the Americans forced us apart in 1923, was Britain’s close ally).

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04 September 2013 5:21 PM

Here comes Hitler again, plus evil dictators in general, appeasement and the rest of the bits and pieces, board, dice, tokens, model ships and planes, and wads of other people’s money that are to be found in that much-loved Westminster and Washington DC board game, ‘How to Start a War’.

I was just wondering, on Sunday morning, how long it would be before Syria’s President Assad would be compared to Adolf Hitler, and the American Secretary of State John Kerry almost immediately obliged by saying Assad had ‘joined the list of Hitler and Hussein’ who had used evil chemical weapons. Alas, all kinds of countries have used these weapons. Many that never used them still made and stockpiled them. If the possession or use of chemical weapons is itself a crime, few major powers are clean. Winston Churchill’s own personal attitude to this matter is interesting, and characteristically robust, but does not fit too well with the ‘Assad as Hitler and Obama as Churchill’ narrative.

It was perhaps a pity that a picture of Mr Kerry, and his spouse, dining with the future Hitler-substitute Bashar Assad (and his spouse, once the subject of an admiring profile in ‘Vogue’, now withdrawn) swiftly emerged from the archives . But what is that greenish fluid they are all about be given to drink?

Perhaps it wasn’t a pity. I myself find the wild mood-swings of the leaders of the ‘West’ , in their attitudes towards foreign despots, very informative. Nicolae Ceausescu’s Order of the Bath springs to mind, not to mention the reunited German state’s belated vendetta against Erich Honecker, whom they had once entertained and met as a diplomatic partner. And of course the very-swiftly-forgotten protests over Deng Xiaoping ‘killing his own people' in Peking’s Tiananmen Square, and the amazing licence granted to Boris Yeltsin to do things (including ‘shelling his own parliament’) which we would never approve of if Vladimir Putin did them. Though perhaps the Egyptian ‘stabilisation government’ or Junta, might get away with it. I see they are now charging Muslim brotherhood figures with murder, and nobody is laughing. As for Robert Mugabe, where does one begin?

These wild mood-swings inform me that their current spasms of outrage are false, and that the reasons they give for their behaviour are not reasons but pretexts, thus encouraging us all to search for the real reason. Does it lie in them, and in their flawed characters - or in some object they privately have, but won’t openly discuss? Perhaps both.

Mr Kerry (whose public speaking style I once unkindly compared to chloroform, after witnessing him alienate and bore a huge theatre full of American Veterans of Foreign Wars in Nashville, Tennessee) also proclaimed that ‘we’ (that is, the Executive of the US government) were ‘not going to lose’ the approaching vote on bombing Syria. This was delivered as a statement rather than a wish. Well, in that case, why hold the vote at all? I do think people should stop trying to influence votes by the stampede method, under which you persuade the more sheeplike voters that, by supporting you, they are just doing what everyone else is doing. Baaaa.

If you actually believe in debate, and people making up their minds on the basis of the arguments, this is surely an outrage. Of course, if you don’t actually believe in unpredictable votes, and cynically regard all this debate stuff as top-dressing for absolute power, then that’s another matter.

But Hitler always comes into this because he is part of a cult, the cult of the good war and the finest hour, one of whose branches is the cult of the nice bomb and the moral bomber.

According to the scriptures of this cult, a wicked dictator called Hitler was overcome by a brave and good democrat called Winston Churchill. Churchill triumphed at Dunkirk, and then fought Hitler to save the Jews from the Holocaust, also liberating Europe at D-Day, so that we all lived happily ever after. A group of people carrying umbrellas, called the ‘appeasers’ and led by a man called ‘Chamberlain’, wickedly opposed Churchill and gave in to Hitler at Munich. If it had not been for them, Hitler would have been seen for what he was, attacked and overthrown long before.

Regular readers of this weblog will know that this version of events contains some nuggets of truth – Hitler was evil and was defeated, Churchill had many noble qualities. Britain, though defeated on land in 1940, was not invaded. But they will also, I think, admit that a) it is far from complete and b) there are probably millions of people in Britain and the USA who believe something very similar to the above, about the events of 1938-45. This, alas, still influences their judgement when their leaders try to get them to go to war.

The most fanatical followers of this cult are, however, not just harmless members of a re-enactment society spending their weekends making ‘Boom!’ and ‘eeeee—ow!’ noises as they play with their Dinky toys and Airfix models in the attic.

They re-enact this myth in the form of actual red war, and are to be found among professional politicians in Britain and America. These initiates periodically choose a new person to take the role of ‘Hitler’. This can be almost anybody, including such minor figures as Manuel Noriega of Panama.

For, in the ritual of the Churchill cultists, the important thing is not who takes the part of Hitler, but who takes the part of Churchill, and who takes the part of Chamberlain.

And the smaller the would-be Churchills get, the smaller the alleged Hitlers get too. Note that, despite its many crimes against the laws of civilisation, the Chinese People’s Republic has never been called upon to play the part of Hitler, nor is it likely to be.

Invariably, the American or British leader calling for war imagines he is Churchill. Invariably, those who oppose the war are classified as appeasers and equated with ‘Chamberlain’. And invariably, the targeted dictator is classified as ‘Hitler’.

The awful truth of the Second World War is that it is much more complicated than that, that it was not fought to rescue the Jews (and largely failed to do so) and that many entirely innocent and harmless people did not experience it or its aftermath as ‘good’; also, that of its two principal victors (neither of whom was Britain, despite Churchill’s role) one, Stalin, was as evil a dictator was one might find in a long day’s search.

Which is why western schoolchildren learn little about the Soviet Army’s part in the defeat of the evil Hitler, or indeed about Churchill’s increasingly subservient, not to say appeasing , relationship with Stalin in the later years of the war. Or why so little is said about how slight Britain’s direct contact with the land forces of Nazi Germany was between 1940 and 1944. Let alone of the complex diplomacy which brought Britain into war with Germany in September 1939.

Let’s discuss some of this. Just before my recent journey to Berlin, I visited my favourite second hand bookshop in search of serendipity, and there found, in stout 1960s Penguin editions priced at three shillings and sixpence, a book I hadn’t read for years (A.J.P. Taylor’s ‘The Origins of the Second World war’ and a book I had never read but felt I should have done ,Len Deighton’s ‘Funeral in Berlin’).What could have been better travel reading, on a journey to Berlin undertaken close to the 74th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second Great War?

I must say I think Deighton’s best work was done elsewhere, and later. But ‘Funeral in Berlin’. Like ‘The Ipcress File’, is tremendously redolent of the rather ghastly 1960s period of iconoclasm, David Frost, the King’s Road and all the rest of it. The buzzing, headachy urgency of the language, the miasma (as Kingsley Amis called it) of expensive king-sized cigarettes and fashionable whiskies. You can almost hear the narrow lapels creaking and the Soho jazz grating on the ear (as Krushchev put it) like a tram accident. It also makes one think of the brilliant encapsulation of that whole rather horrible era in the opening moments of the Michael Caine film of ‘Ipcress’ . Bad old ways were being cast aside, to be replaced by bad new ways.

Deighton was also years ahead of John le Carre’s ‘A Perfect Spy’ in making the point that spies themselves are more like each other than they are like the people who employ them, and that their mutual understanding (which looks like betrayal to the rest of us) casts doubt on the ideologies whose spearheads they are.

I didn’t myself think it evokes the old East Berlin very much. Reading it in my rented, westernised flat in the Heinrich Heine Strasse (a few hundred yards from a former border crossing), with a fine view of the TV tower and the old Red Rathaus, I felt he’d somehow missed the real feeling of the murky, thrilling city I still remember so well. But there are some unpleasant and disturbing thoughts on how much of the wicked Nazi state, especially its secret service, survived the death of Hitler. And, put in the mouth of a German war veteran, there are some unsettling remarks about how much Britain experienced war, in comparison with either Germany or Russia.

Taylor, on the other hand, wears very well. His writing remains clear, intelligent and perceptive. He invites the reader into a sort of complicity. Look, he says, most people couldn’t bear this much reality, but you and I can. Sit down and listen to this…

His dismissal of the importance of the Hossbach memorandum, supposedly a sinister deep-laid plan for war, actually an inconsequential political ploy, his casual mention of the fact that the Czech president Emil Hacha, was not ‘summoned’ to Berlin in 1939 but sought the meeting himself, and a dozen other myth-cracking torpedoes, all still have the freshness they must have had when his book was published (to howls of rage) in 1961.

I must say I find his argument that Hitler was a wild improviser, and that French and British attitudes towards him, Germany and Eastern Europe were incompetent and often absurd, much more persuasive than the standard narrative. He also offers a better explanation than anyone else of how (through a series of bungles and miscalculations) Britain ended up madly guaranteeing Poland and so giving Colonel Beck, the Polish Foreign Minister, the power to start a general European war whenever he chose. He chose September 1939, and much good it did him.

Nobody reading this work would be impressed by the diplomatic skills of politicians, or anxious to offer them any power to start wars. They do not, for the most part, have a clue what they are doing. They claim success if it turns out all right, and are never there when the booby prizes for failure, death and loss are being awarded.

30 December 2012 3:10 PM

Those of us who know what is going on in this country are often derided by smug, wealthy Londoners. They accuse us of ‘moral panic’ and of exaggerating the breakdown of our society. I ask these complacent people to consider the terrible death of Alan Greaves, attacked on Christmas Eve itself. He was on his way to play the organ at Midnight Mass.

Instead he met evil on a suburban road, as it is now all too easy to do. Our safety on the dark streets does not depend on police patrols, which is a good thing as they have virtually been abolished.

It depends on an invisible web of goodness and restraint, conscience and courage – all things encouraged by the Christian belief that Mr Greaves did so much to support, and which we celebrate and recall at this time of year. Yet these protections could not be relied upon.

A gentle, kindly man could not walk safely from his home to his church. His wife’s casual goodbye to him turned out to be a final farewell. The horrible, diabolical injuries he suffered suggest that his assailant’s mind is in some way unhinged, quite possibly by the drugs which we have effectively legalised in our pursuit of pleasure at all costs. Yet no general conclusions will be drawn from this by those who take all the decisions in our society.

Those who pontificated grandiosely about a school massacre in America will see no lesson in this, because it does not suit their views. The loss of Mr Greaves, a 68-year-old grandfather, has left a great dark gap in the lives of many people who loved, liked or respected him. But it is the manner of his death that ought to wake a feeling of alarm – and shame – in the minds of those who have subjected this country to a vast, 50-year liberal experiment.

We were going to be so enlightened and progressive that we would no longer have to be good. Authority, punishment, morality, self-discipline, patience, thrift, religion were all deemed to be outdated and unnecessary, not to mention repressive, backward and unfit for this wondrous new century. It was, of course, a terrible mistake, though none of those responsible will admit it, so it goes on and on.

And now we live in a country where an organist can meet a violent end on his way to a Christmas service, and the police can explain such an incident as ‘a robbery gone wrong’. Who thought of this idiotic, insulting phrase? Do our modern non-judgmental police think there is ever a robbery that goes right? The trouble is that they probably do.

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THE horrifying undead figure of Anthony Blair is sniffing around the edge of politics again, hoping to revive his old campaign for the presidency of Europe. Presumably the great apostle of democracy has tired of making £4,500-a-minute speeches at power stations in Azerbaijan, that grubby despotism. Or he has made so much money his bank has asked him to stop.

This reminds me of the many similarities between Princess Tony and his keen imitator, Mr Slippery, our Prime Minister. Both believe in nothing very much. Both loathe their own parties. Both were the future once, but aren’t any more. Old Slippery slipped himself into the papers last week by getting as wet as his policies have become since he failed to get elected on a Thatcherite platform in Stafford back in 1997.

I have seen rare pictures of his face the night he lost, and his surprised disappointment is striking. But I am told there is evidence, mouldering in the archives of an Oxford freesheet, that it took him quite a while to come round to the positions he now so passionately espouses. He is said (does anyone have copies, from May and July 2000?) to have jeered at Mr Blair’s pro-homosexual policies as a ‘fringe agenda’ and condemned Labour for ‘ripping the last recognition of marriage from the tax system by abolishing the married couples’ allowance’.

What we definitely know is that he wrote to a national newspaper in December 2000, sneering at Shaun Woodward, the Tory defector to Labour who then occupied his Witney seat. Amusingly, he attacked Mr Woodward for supporting a hunting ban, and also for backing ‘the promotion of homosexuality in schools’. Of course, Mr Woodward was behaving quite logically, hoping for a safe Labour seat, which he got.

But why is MrCameron deliberately riling his own supporters by rushing through same-sex marriage, while forgetting his support for hunting and old-style marriage? My guess is that he knows he cannot possibly win the next Election (he’s right about that). So he is deliberately creating rows with traditional Tories, so that he can blame them for his defeat and general utter failure. You read it here first.

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The Liberal Elite normally prefer to ignore me as if I were a bad smell. So I was rather touched by last week’s letter, published in The Mail on Sunday, from Rachel Smith, who is also Mrs Vince Cable – and probably thinks much as he does. She wrote to criticise my article about how cultural revolution and mass migration have destroyed the country we used to know. She accused me of nostalgia for the Fifties, and argued that independent-minded individuals could flourish without the married family.

She claimed that we need mass immigration, and that a property tax would narrow the gap between rich and poor. First, she needs to know that I have no great affection for the Fifties, which I recall as grubby, smoky and chilly, with bad food and a general feeling of skimping and unacknowledged national decline. I don’t want the past back. I just think we chose the wrong future. The best way of bridging the gap between rich and poor would be to rebuild the old middle class, open to all with talent. But it has been squeezed half to death by confiscatory tax, an expanding State and by the destruction of grammar schools – like the one her husband went to.

It is in childhood that the stable married family promotes private life, allowing one generation to pass on its morals, faith, language and traditions to the next. These days most children are swiftly indoctrinated either by the TV or by the State, as their parents scrabble to pay the mortgage. As for her idea that we ‘need’ the skills of migrants, who does she mean by ‘we’? Certainly not the British-born people priced out of work by newcomers.

If Britain does need these skills, then why can’t it impart them to the millions of young people already living here, now idle on benefits? Could it be because of the disastrous failure of comprehensive education, evident to almost every thinking person in the country, except for politicians like her husband?

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Coming from a Naval family, I’ve grown to mistrust the claim that Mrs Thatcher saved the Falklands. It was the Royal Navy that did it. And I’d rather hoped this year’s Cabinet Papers would remind us that in 1981 the Iron Lady had approved the scrapping of the carrier Hermes, plus the assault ships Fearless and Intrepid, and the sale of Invincible. If the Argentinians had waited a few months longer to invade, we would not have had a task force with which to win the islands back. As for the ‘special relationship’ with the USA, bitter laughter is the only response to this stupid phrase.

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Good to see the proper English name for China’s capital revived again, in the phrase ‘Peking Pound’. Why did we ever stop using it? We don’t call Rome ‘Roma’ or Damascus ‘Dimashq’. France’s grandest newspaper, Le Monde, still refers to ‘Pekin’, and Germany’s majestic Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung uses ‘Peking’. ‘Beijing’ is a cowardly cringe to power.